For the last thirty years, the twin goals of IT have been efficiency and productivity, and the CIO’s role has been to make everything faster and cheaper. When businesses were run on spreadsheets, IT could put in a few software systems and deliver some pretty significant value. With the advent of e-mail and other collaboration tools, IT kept on delivering. Along came ERP (enterprise resource planning), and the CIOs became involved with business process change, which helped them continue, for the most part, to deliver on IT’s promises. Enter outsourcing, and CIOs had another productivity arrow in their quiver.

Cloud, consumerization, and mobility have moved CIOs into a new zone and have created a new set of responsibilities and business expectations. According to Werner Boeing, CIO of Roche Diagnostics, “When it comes to consumer technologies, many CIOs have not found a way to define their contribution in this new environment, and the business perceives us as standing in their way. Our traditional mantra of standardization and consolidation does not work anymore.” In other words, those CIOs who are spending their time writing policies about whether or not employees can use iPads at work are missing the point. “Many CIOs believe that simply orchestrating the consumerization trend is their role and that giving people a work experience similar to the one they have at home is a valuable contribution. But that’s not innovation, that’s just deploying technology,” says Boeing.

If CIOs can no longer provide enough business value through consolidation, standardization, business process change, and deploying iPads at work, where should they focus? “The new dimension for IT contribution is business model innovation,” says Boeing. “it is about giving up the defensive stance and being active driver in changing the way your company does business. Business model innovation is the new contribution of IT.”

Be a Chameleon

If CIOs are to adopt and deliver on a new mantra of business model innovation, they have to reassess the skills they bring to the job. “Here’s a paradox for you,” says Boeing. “People believe that IT is about technology, but it’s really a behavioral science – understanding the behaviors of your company’s staff, leaders, and customers – and facilitating the adoption of a new vision.”

So, your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to view IT innovation not as project delivery, change management, and business process reengineering, but as setting a vision for business model innovation. It’s not “How can I deliver iPads to my sales team?” but “How does the advent of iPads change our business model, and how can I share that vision with my fellow executives?”

Now, this is a tall order indeed. CIOs are already responsible for internal systems, data management, business process change at an enterprise level, and the security and deployment of thousands of new devices. Let’s add meeting with external customers, developing new business models for the company, and communicating the vision for new models to the company at multiple levels. According to John Dick, CIO of HR consulting firm, Tower Watson, probably the most important skill a CIO can possess is the ability to do it all, to move from operations to security to project oversight to innovation, as business needs and technology options change. I call this ability to adapt “the chameleon factor”, and it is not a skill everyone possesses.

In diese Kerbe schlägt auch eine aktuelle Studie von Forrester Research mit dem Titel The Social CIO. Sie hält fest, dass Unternehmen noch weit entfernt von dem sind, was ein Social Business ausmacht – nämlich: “removing the barriers between people (employees, customers, partners) and information while making it easier for people to work together using that information to solve business problems.”

This renewed focus on customer value, customer service and customer experiences is what becoming a social business is all about. Many companies are still struggling with this major cultural transition. For the past few decades, process reengineering, productivity improvements and cost reductions have been the most prominent features of their company’s culture. These are hard, quantitative, measurable, task-oriented management competencies, focusing on technology, logistics, operations and controls.

Customer value is different. It requires a complementary set of management competencies, much softer or people-oriented in nature, including a focus on human capital, strategy, decision making, innovation and social skills.

“Chief financial officers at companies in ultra-competitive industries such as semiconductors often want to preserve as much cash as possible on the income statement to make Wall Street and investors happy. One way to do that is by limiting operational expenses such as cloud services … The desire to preserve cash to placate Wall Street isn’t new. In fact, the impulse to limit operational expenses in the past has been so strong that it has led to several accounting scandals. ”